rain and snows

Sheets of cold wet thick rain here in the high country followed by snow. We have a tin roof on our house and you can hear the rain hitting the tin and the snow falling off in clumps when it gets warm. The snow slams into the adobe dirt and there are all sizes of explosions and huge bangs as the snow discharges. If you keep the tv off and music off for days you tune into the desert and the rhythm and flow it brings. On the surface nothing looks like it is happening, just a giant brown ocean of adobe. If you listen ,you begin to hear songbirds, brother crow and the wind that comes up like a fury, the same wind that bedeviled Odysseus and bedevils all of us out here in the desert. It seems to come from the east and blows and blows until it drives you mad. At night it literally feels like it has fingers ripping away at our roof. In the morning we're always amazed that the roof is still there.
It's fundamental that when you live close to nature and out of the city how much the weather enters the fabric of your life. You can't work outside when the winds come, it will tear off your sun hat, ripping tools and materials from your hands and leaving them strewn over the landscape, and if you do steel yourself to this the head winds beat at you all day as you're pushing a wheel barrow hauling rock for a wall until you're beaten down and you start to feel as tall as the low scrub junipers that have found a way to squat low and let the wind blow over them. I've been out there for a week at a time in that wind, building an adobe wall with Ramon and come home with legs like jello and taken to my bed for three days. The weather is a third person out here. It takes on all the importance of any great tragedy, comedy. Turn off the tv, the news and just sit.
--Santa Fe, Jan7. my art site http://www.sfabstract.com/ for the visual part of my Santa Fe experience. -jgk